14. Far From Normal
My dad had a rare type of cancer that affected the bones in his face and jaw. When I was five years old, he had a tumor the size of a softball removed from one cheek. They removed his cheekbone, bottom jaw, nerves, lymph nodes…basically everything. He survived, but the worst was yet to come—that’s because the surgeon did a horrible job with the skin graft and spaced the stitches way too far apart.
A couple of weeks after his first operation, the wound got infected. I remember my mom and I were coming home after school one day and it was unusual to see that my dad was also home that early. He was getting out of his car as we were pulling up to the house, and the stitches on his face had started to rip open, but he tried to hide it from us as he ran into the house.
That was just one of the many horrible things that happened while my dad was sick. Being a kid and witnessing that level of gore so frequently desensitized me to it. I didn’t realize how bad it was growing up in a household with a mangled parent until I was much older. Seeing the stitches on his face rip open like that was not part of a normal childhood at all.